A Sumerian Flood Tablet That Described A City Nobody Can Find

A Sumerian Flood Tablet That Described A City Nobody Can Find

There is a clay tablet in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, badly damaged, two thirds of it gone, what remains pressed into clay by a Babylonian scribe around 1600 BCE carrying a story considerably older than that. Scholars call it the Eridu Genesis. It is the oldest surviving flood myth in the Sumerian language and it names five cities that existed before the flood. Four of them have been found. Eridu, Shuruppak, Sippar, Bad-tibira, all excavated, all confirmed by inscribed tablets pulled from their ruins, all sitting on archaeological maps with coordinates and pottery sequences and occupation layers reaching back thousands of years. The fifth city is called Larak and it has never been conclusively located. It sits in the list beside four confirmed real places, named with identical formula, assigned to its god with identical ritual weight, referenced across multiple Sumerian documents as casually and consistently as any other city in Mesopotamia. And the space where it should be on every archaeological map of southern Mesopotamia is empty. What makes this genuinely interesting rather than just a missing city is that the Sumerians described Eridu with the same matter-of-fact geographical specificity they applied to Larak, and Eridu was exactly where they said it was. When these people used this descriptive mode, they meant something real. The question of where Larak actually is, or whether the answer is sitting beneath an unexcavated mound in a region that has barely been touched, is one that archaeology has quietly set aside and probably should not have.

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